“A Chinese-owned company operating in the Washington, D.C., area hacked Hillary Clinton’s private server throughout her term as secretary of state and obtained nearly all her emails,” reads the opening line of Richard Pollock’s bombshell report for The Daily Caller.

Posted Monday evening, the piece continues:

“The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation. The Chinese wrote code that was embedded in the server, which was kept in Clinton’s residence in upstate New York. The code generated an instant ‘courtesy copy’ for nearly all of her emails and forwarded them to the Chinese company.”

According to Pollock’s piece, the Intelligence Community Inspector General “discovered the anomaly pretty early in 2015.” That was before the FBI launched its investigation into Clinton’s use of the private server — an investigation that was launched by a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General.

This report — if accurate — refutes virtually everything told us by Clinton herself, her presidential campaign, former President Obama, former FBI Director James Comey, and substantially the entire mainstream media, all of whom dismissed her use of a private, unsecured email system as much ado about nothing.

Former President Obama said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” “I don’t think it posed a security problem … This is not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.”

Contrary to Obama’s assertions, we now know Hillary Clinton’s private email server didn’t just endanger U.S. national security; it compromised U.S. national security.

As former FBI Director Comey said in his July 5, 2016, statement exonerating Clinton:

“We have done extensive work to understand what indication there might be of compromise by hostile actors in connection with the personal email operation … With respect to potential computer intrusion by hostile actors, we did not find direct evidence that Secretary Clinton’s personal email domain, in its various configurations since 2009, was successfully hacked.”

In light of this new evidence that a Chinese company successfully hacked Clinton’s unsecured server, that’s a remarkable statement by the former FBI Director — especially when you stop to consider that the entire investigation began as a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General, focused on determining whether classified information was transmitted on her personal server.

Remember, just last month when former FBI Agent Peter Strzok testified before Congress, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert asked Strzok about his meeting with Intelligence Community Inspector General Chuck McCullough’s investigator, Frank Rucker, who told Strzok about the “anomaly” found on Clinton’s email server.

Strzok said, “I remember meeting Mr. Rucker on either one or two occasions. I do not recall the specific content or discussions.”

And Gohmert followed up by asking:

“Mr. Rucker reported to those of you, the four of you there, in the presence of the ICIG attorney, that they had found this anomaly on Hillary Clinton’s emails going through their private server, and when they had done the forensic analysis, they found on her emails, every single one except four, over 30,000, were going to an address that was not on the distribution list. It was a compartmentalized bit of information that was sending it to an unauthorized source. Do you recall that?”

Strzok replied, “Sir, I don’t.”

So one of two things must be true: either Comey was lying, or the FBI’s so-called “investigation” was totally incompetent, and failed to find evidence that the Clinton email server was successfully hacked by a foreign entity, even though the intelligence community inspector general asked the FBI to launch the investigation because he had reason to believe an unauthorized entity had already hacked the server.

I’m not sure which is more distressing — the thought that the FBI Director and his aides would willfully declare that they had found no evidence of foreign hacking, knowing the statement to be untrue, or the thought that the FBI was so incompetent that it couldn’t find evidence of foreign hacking even after it had been handed the evidence by the Intelligence Community Inspector General?

Is it any wonder so many Americans have come to believe that the entire FBI so-called “investigation” of Clinton’s unsecured private email server was totally rigged?

Jenny Beth Martin is the Chairwoman of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.